WMNF: From listener-supported to listener-reported

Grab your tape recorder and go. The first training class of volunteer news reporters has hit the airwaves.

[Times photos: Toni L. Sandys]

Kristen Friend-Weaver, 26, interviews Gina Genry, 29, of Oldsmar, at an antiwar demonstration in Tampa recently. Friend-Weaver is a volunteer reporter for WMNF-FM 88.5. Holding the sign at right is Brandon Botteron, 22, of Oldsmar.

“They said, ‘Here’s your tape recorder, here’s your microphone, here you go,’ “ Kristen Friend-Weaver says after taking WMNF’s training course with nine other volunteers. “It was trial by fire, but I love it.”

TAMPA - Sometimes the work of volunteers makes the news. At WMNF, volunteers are reporting it.

The Tampa Bay area's community radio station, WMNF-FM 88.5, has relied on volunteers throughout its 23-year history, from the 13 intrepid folks who went door to door in the late 1970s to raise money to start the station to the almost 300 who staff its broadcasts and events today.

The station added another kind of volunteer last fall, when it trained its first class of 10 volunteer reporters to cover local news. A second group began training this month, following the station's January startup of an hour of news at 6 p.m. each weekday.

Kristen Friend-Weaver, 26, was in the first group and found herself reporting stories a week after she finished the training. "They said, "Here's your tape recorder, here's your microphone, here you go,' " she says. "It was trial by fire, but I love it."

Friend-Weaver has been a WMNF listener since she moved to Tampa three years ago. She has a degree in photojournalism from Indiana University.

She was studying graphic design and thinking of getting back into journalism when she heard about the volunteer training on the radio. A couple of months later, she was covering court cases, city council meetings and antiwar protests, about one day a week. And she's thinking of making it a career: "Hopefully, someday I'll get paid for this."

"Our new programming relies on volunteer reporters," Mitch Perry says. Perry, WMNF's assistant news and public affairs director, is leading the six-week course, covering everything from writing for radio to digital editing. "There was a lot of competition to get into this class. About 40 people applied," he says.

Ten were chosen, and eight gather around a conference table at the station on a Saturday morning for the first training session. Their level of news experience runs from none to a couple of decades.

They range in age from 23 to 50 and live all over the bay area. Many are already WMNF volunteers. They are college students, a counselor, a Web designer, a school nurse, a stay-at-home mom and a former NASA employee.

What they share is an interest not just in news but in the community activism WMNF embraces. Brandy Doyle, a 23-year-old New College graduate, says, "I'm excited about the opportunity to explore journalism at a community-oriented, noncorporate station."

Rob Lorei, the station's news and public affairs director and one of its founders, is on hand to speak to the class and take them on a tour of the station. He talks about WMNF's history and its mission statement of commitment to cultural diversity, equality, peace and social and economic justice.

That translates to music programming that, in today's cookie-cutter radio market, is wildly eclectic. WMNF airs everything from reggae to polka, from bluegrass to experimental electronic music.

It also translates to public affairs programming with an unabashed political stance.

"Some people think WMNF is supposed to be left wing," Lorei says. "Our charge is to ensure people have a greater understanding of each other. We want to provide the balance for the mainstream media. . . .

"Our inclination is to find the grass roots people. If we lean, that's the way we lean."

That approach is one reason many of the volunteers are here.

Sarah Miselis, 35, of Tampa earned a degree in environmental studies and worked for the state and Hillsborough County, but, she says, "I was very frustrated with the environmental and regulatory field."

Since last year, she has been the stay-at-home mother of two children, ages 2 and 5, adopted from Kazakstan. "They're just doing great. And I think I'm recovering from the shock." Miselis says she is interested in environmental news, adoption issues and homelessness.

An interest in "the environmental side of WMNF" also brought Brenda Griffith to the class. She moved to Lithia this year after working for 13 years as a human factors engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

"Part of our mission was to protect the astronauts" from toxins and environmental factors, she says. "We had to observe very strict military standards. When I hear about things like arsenic being released in the water . . . I'm very aware of the health and safety issues. I think it's an issue of education."

Miselis and Griffith are newcomers to reporting, but Greg Wade is a 20-year veteran. Wade, 45, of Tampa has been a correspondent for the American Urban Radio Network and UPI, covering presidential campaigns, the Crown Heights riots and the UN Millennium Conference. He's now a vocational-educational-clinical counselor.

Wade is interested in local political issues such as the below-average turnout for the recent Tampa mayoral election. "The black and Latino communities are disenchanted with the process because there's not enough information flowing equitably."

Farhad Sabet, 31, a Web designer who lives in Largo, is interested in politics, too. Born in Iran, he lived in Belgium and New York before coming to Florida.

"For three-quarters of my life I have been a minority," Sabet says. "I'm very much touched by the war and interested in how minorities are touched by the war."

Dan Szematowicz, 24, of Tampa is a USF political science student, and a musician. "This is my first foray into broadcasting. I'd just like to get my feet in the door."

He'd like to cover the North Korean community here. He says he has met people who were former slaves in North Korea and would like to report on the human rights abuses there.

Seeing Szematowicz at the meeting was a bonus for Jan Setzekorn, 50, of Clearwater. She is the health coordinator at Tampa Preparatory School, where, she says, "Dan was a student of mine. It's heartening to see young people you've worked with have an interest in something you have an interest in."

Setzekorn has been a volunteer on the Women's Show on WMNF since 1995. "This will be different, expanding my vision of the news."

Setzekorn may also be able to teach the newbies how to squeeze through the hallways at the station. WMNF operates out of a tight-fitting building in Southeast Seminole Heights, where a dozen full-time staffers, several studios and a music library of 45,000 CDs are crammed into a rough-and-ready space not much bigger than the average house.

Lorei and Perry talk about the depth they hope for in reports, playing a recent WMNF segment on a Clearwater rally in support of the troops in Iraq. It runs 71/2 minutes.

"The average sound bite on TV is four, five, six, seven seconds," Lorei says. "Back in the '60s and '70s that sound bite was 30 seconds. Watch BBC news and you'll see them give one or two minutes to a sound bite. Here they feel your attention span is limited."

Lorei gestures at a couple of tape recorders he calls "relics of the past. Instead of taking a razor blade to a piece of tape . . . it's all done on computers now." Reporters use minidisc recorders in the field.

Wedged into the master-bedroom-size newsroom are Lorei's and Perry's desks, desks for two other staffers and a table full of production equipment.

Perry says, "There's not enough room for more than a couple of reporters in the building at one time."

Until WMNF started its weekday evening news Jan. 21, there was no room for them on the air, either. Perry says they turned away people interested in volunteer reporting.

But the expanded newscast has been a resounding success, Perry says, judging by the $21,087 listeners pledged in five nights during a fundraising marathon only six weeks after the newscast debuted.

With the evening news and five-minute local newsbreaks four times a day, he says, "There's lots of opportunity here, especially in the morning newscasts. You have to make a sacrifice, get up at 5 a.m., but if you volunteer, you have to do those kinds of things."

Perry, 40, started that way himself. He came to WMNF three years ago from KPFA-FM in Berkeley, Calif., founded in 1949 as the nation's first community radio station. He started as a volunteer reporter there in 1995.

KPFA has about 25 volunteer reporters, and Perry says he is basing the training at WMNF on the classes there.

Friend-Weaver says the class taught her "most of what I needed to know."

The biggest surprise: "I didn't honestly expect to be on the radio," she says. "I don't know why, but I sort of thought I'd be writing or producing. But within a week of the final class, I was on the air."

WMNF relies on volunteers for almost everything because it is a listener-supported nonprofit.

Its annual budget is about $1-million, Lorei says. About $700,000 of that comes from fundraising marathons, about $100,000 each from the state and federal governments, and the rest from concerts and events such as the upcoming Tropical Heatwave.

Perry says the commitment asked of volunteer reporters is one day a week. Because of turnover, he expects to continue the classes once or twice a year.

As for selection criteria, Perry says, "There's no perfect candidate.

"We wanted the group to be representative, not just in terms of diverse kinds of people . . . also diverse geographically. . . . We've got Tampa covered pretty well, and we really want to spread out to Pinellas County, Sarasota."

WMNF has one of the most powerful signals among the 60 or 70 community radio stations in the United States, reaching about 100,000 listeners each week in six counties.

That's a lot of territory to cover local news in, but that's one of the aims of the expanded coverage. Lorei tells the volunteers, "It's important to pay attention to what's going on at the city council, at the county commission. Most people get their news from TV. They're horrified when they find out what's going on at the state Capitol.

"Part of our mission is to help people bond with our community."

After the meeting, Miselis says something Lorei said captured her reason for volunteering: "If you can make people understand why they should care about something, connect them to the world around them, you can make a difference."

- For information about volunteering at WMNF, call (813) 238-8001, ext. 26, or go to www.wmnf.org

- Contact Colette Bancroft at bancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435.

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